Missing Plutonium Found in House and Garden Near Reading

In early 1999, Corporate Watch covered the case of Raymond Fox of Earley, near Reading who had been made dangerously ill, allegedly by pollution emanating from the old Shell petrochemicals depot behind his house. Drainage channels around the site sloped down to a point immediately behind the end of Fox’s garden. When the plant life in Fox’s garden began to wither following the washing down of the site in 1994, he became suspicious about the old depot. Fox discovered a drain at the very back of his garden unmarked on surveys and apparently constructed without planning permission. Soon after entering the drain to investigate he became extremely ill. Before long he was suffering seizures, convulsions and internal bleeding.
Shell denies any responsibility for the contamination of Fox’s property and the mysterious drain, as does BP which owned the site at one time. Wokingham District Council (WDC), the local authority, also denies all knowledge of a problem. The discovery of radioactive materials on the site now suggests that other agencies may be responsible.

Fox has been unable to work due to his illness and his company Fox Building has long since gone bankrupt. Unable to obtain adequate treatment in the UK, he has had to go to Germany to receive detoxification treatment. Tests conducted by Dr Josef Kees in Germany revealed that Fox was poisoned by a wide variety of petrochemicals, pesticides and even radioactive materials.
More than four years later Ray Fox is still seeking justice and aims to take his case to the European Court. Independent environmental testing has now been conducted, however, and he at last has hard evidence of contamination on his property.

Dr Chris Busby of Green Audit and the Low Level Radiation Campaign has confirmed that Fox’s property is contaminated with nuclear materials. Dr Busby collected and analysed samples from the house and garden.
His results show extraordinary levels of both plutonium and uranium. The plutonium was found to be 100 to 500 times background levels and more than five times higher than that found by tests near the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. The relative levels of different uranium isotopes indicated enriched uranium as used in nuclear reactors. Busby’s report speculates that “solvent used for cleaning a nuclear reactor or some part of a reactor might carry the material and deposit it [on Fox’s property] after a fire,” and he concludes, “the house and land at 337 Wokingham Road, Reading are contaminated with uranium and plutonium which originated in a nuclear reactor.”

Wokingham District Council have now commissioned their own tests in the area. WDC claims that the tests, carried out in partnership with the Environment Agency and National Radiological Protection Board, show only background levels of radiation in the area and have written to the local residents claiming that there is no significant pollution. They have not however tested Fox’s property. He is currently denying them access while he pursues legal action against them in the European courts
A spokeswoman for the district council said: “We took tests from the neighbours either side and in front of the property. So our tests are just showing there’s no source of contamination in the area so there is no need for other residents to be concerned,” she added.

Fox dismissed the Environment Agency report as a “pack of lies”, adding, “there is an EC investigation and there will be criminal proceedings against Wokingham District Council.”
Speaking at the Green Party’s Autumn Conference in Lancaster, Busby commented, “Again and again people find leukaemia clusters where there are no nuclear power stations or obvious sources of a problem. The problem of Ray Fox makes it clear that a great deal of the contamination that exists in England is as a result of practices that have been kept secret.”
Busby and Caroline Lucas MEP have recently met with Stephen Kaiser and Augustin Janssens, the head of radiological protection for the European Commission, who have agreed to investigate Fox’s case.

Fate of public services
‘in the hands of unelected trade lawyers’

A report published this month by the World Development Movement reveals how control of significant parts of the UK services economy, including essential public services such as health and education, have been signed over to unelected trade lawyers at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) without any public or parliamentary debate as part of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).
WDM has attempted to reveal what the government will not – which sectors have already been partly or wholly signed up to GATS. Peter Hardstaff from WDM said, ‘Since the UK signed up to GATS in 1994 it has not produced a single document fully explaining either what the UK is committed to or the implications of its commitments. We have been forced to do the government’s work for it.’
Among the sectors that the report reveals have already been partially or wholly signed up to GATS are: health services, private education, rail maintenance, environmental (sewage and sanitation), retail, financial and banking services. Sectors currently being targeted in GATS negotiations for further opening to the free market include: postal services, broadcasting and communications, care homes, health care and education.
GATS has been described by the EC as ‘first and foremost an instrument for the benefit of business’. It certainly isn’t an instrument for the benefit of public service users. GATS rules govern the extent and nature of foreign companies’ involvement in the delivery of services and limit the ability of governments to regulate the market in service sectors. Bringing rail maintenance and repair services back under some form of public ownership would breach the UK’s existing GATS commitments. Planning regulations affecting the expansion of large supermarkets could be ruled an ‘unnecessary barrier to trade’ and overly ‘burdensome’ on business. The EU is currently trying to get poorer countries to commit to ‘liberalising’ water services, allowing mostly European transnationals to take over with the disastrous effects seen in Latin America, South Africa and elsewhere. Not only this, but GATS commitments are effectively irreversible – if ‘liberalisation’ doesn’t work, a country can’t take the sector back under its control.
Theoretically, public services are excluded from the scope of GATS, but this only applies to services ‘supplied neither on a commercial basis nor in competition with one or more service suppliers’. The WTO Secretariat has specifically questioned whether, for example, the co-existence of public and private hospitals does not constitute competition.
Decisions are being made by unelected officials for the benefit of corporations, which could permanently bind public services into a globalised profit system without regard for the human cost. Isn’t it time we slowed down on this?

To get involved in the last stages of the government’s ‘consultation’ on GATS, contact WDM:
http://www.wdm.org.uk/presrel/current/ukgatspublic.htm
World Development Movement 25 Beehive Place, London, SW9 7QR

Good news for Burma

In September, Premier Oil decided to pull out of its operations in Burma, marking the end of a decade-long campaign by the Burma Campaign UK (BCUK). Premier was the largest investor in Burma, with a stake estimated at $200m in a project to pipe gas from Burma’s vast Yetagun offshore field. The company has faced heavy criticism for its role in propping up the brutal military dictatorship in Burma and for human rights abuses committed by pipeline security forces. Premier’s decision to pull out of Burma marks the end of a decade long campaign. The company had also received requests from Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and even the British Government to pull out of Burma.
Premier’s withdrawal from Burma is part of a $670m restructuring deal in which the company’s two largest shareholders, Petronas and Amerada Hess, will strip the company of its Burmese and Indonesian assets. John Jackson, Director of BCUK stated that “the demise and fall of Premier is a warning to any company thinking about investing in Burma – it’s more trouble than it’s worth.” He also added “we’ve won a battle but not the war. The pressure needs to be turned up on TotalFinaElf and Unocal, who are as guilty as Premier of propping up one of the most brutal regimes in the world.”

The pressure certainly was turned up on Unocal later on in the week, when a federal appeals court in the US ruled that Unocal can be sued by the victims of atrocities committed by government soldiers in charge of security for the $1.2 billion Yadena pipeline. This pipeline pumps gas from offshore fields in the Andaman Sea, through Burma into Thailand. Activists have alleged that the project involved the forcible relocation of villages, forced labour and other serious abuses, including rape and murder committed by government troops employed by the company to protect the pipeline’s construction.

However if the atrocities happen to have occurred in one of Bush’s ally states in The War Against Terror, it appears the story may be slightly different. With a blatant disregard for justice, the US state department last month asked a federal judge to dismiss a similar case against Exxon Mobil. The case had been brought by victims of abuses committed by Indonesian security forces in the Aceh province. And the reason for the state department wishing to dismiss the case? – that trying the case could harm George Dubya’s anti-terrorist campaign by discouraging the co-operation of the Indonesian military and discouraging US investment there. The judge in the case has yet to rule on the request.
Check out www.freeburmacoalition.org for news of the continuing boycott of Suzuki.

NATO expands… but at whose expense?
Pippa Gallop

November saw the first NATO summit to be held in a former Eastern Bloc country, and once again, thousands of people converged on Prague to protest against the organisation, both for its policies and its very existence.
NATO has been criticised for its lack of strategic role since the end of the Cold War, but its bellicose actions in the Balkans and Afghanistan have indicated that it is still dedicated to expanding the US sphere of influence in its new guise as the armed wing of corporate globalization. As US journalist, author, and free marketeer Thomas Friedman stated: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.’
During the summit, eight states were invited to join: Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Joining NATO is a goal of most Eastern European countries in the same way that joining the European Union is. But is this justified? Who will ultimately benefit from this arrangement?

NATO membership is a way of cementing one’s stance as an ally of the US, with all the attendant implications. It is far from clear, however, what exact benefits it brings for the countries joining. Most explanations by governments hoping to join are vague mentions of ‘stability’ and ‘security’. One fairly precise document on this subject is a study by the Employers Association of Bulgaria/The Centre for Liberal Strategies, which sets out the supposed economic benefits of joining NATO. It names increased defence spending, investment in infrastructure, and long-term rises in inward investment due to improved status and political characteristics needed to be admitted to NATO. But is an increase in defence spending really in the public interest, especially since most of the contracts go to Western arms companies such as McDonnell-Douglas, Lockheed-Martin, or Raytheon? Since 1996, there have already been $78,073,314 worth of arms licenses and agreements between the US and Bulgaria. Not all of these will have been paid for by the Bulgarian taxpayer – NATO expansion is also heavily opposed by those who object to Western taxpayers paying part of the (extremely unpredictable and ever-increasing) costs – but even so, spending money on NATO-compatible arms is a huge burden. For example, $990,948,470 worth of arms licenses and agreements have been made between the US and Romania since 1996, and this for a country where I was told during a visit last summer that the hospitals were lacking something as basic as antidote to adder bites.
In order to cover the costs of the transfers, the West has developed a variety of schemes, including selling off second-hand weapons, offering ‘no-cost leases’ and negotiating offset agreements, which involve investing in the country or buying other products. These deals are perceived by central and eastern European countries as a means to stimulate foreign investment and trade. While offsets appear to reduce the financial burden on the purchasers by stimulating investment, the burden is instead shifted to Western taxpayers, and a corporate welfare scheme is created, whereby arms companies produce and make huge profits from subsidized weapons for other countries. The clear winners here are the arms companies, so it comes as no surprise that they are the biggest supporters of expansion. In April 1997, then-Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine promised to support Romania’s bid for NATO membership in return for the Romanian purchase of an $82 million radar system from his company – this is about the level of subtlety of the arms industry’s campaign for NATO expansion.

So is anyone else benefiting? Well yes. All the talk of stability is generally misleading, as it seems that NATO expansion may bring a regional arms race, but as long as we are talking of military stability and blind loyalty to the US, then it does have some relevance, because stability is a necessary precondition for certain things: Firstly, for the West to access markets, and secondly, particularly if we look at the location of aspiring NATO members, for transporting oil out of the Caspian Sea region and across to the fuel-hungry West. The list of members of NATO’s Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, and Partnership for Peace mostly consists of those countries through which Caspian oil may be transported.
As NATO takes care of the military aspect, another, less well-known institution takes care of the logistics of oil transportation: INOGATE (Interstate Oil and Gas Transport to Europe), a European Commission initiative, was launched in 1996. One of its forthcoming projects is the South-East European Line (SEEL), which would link the Romanian Black Sea Port of Constanta with Serbia’s Pancevo refinery near Belgrade and Omisalj in Croatia.
Bringing these countries into NATO’s fold is one way to ensure their dependence on and compliance with the demands of the West, whilst gradually moving the alliance south and eastwards in order to ensure the military control of all areas relevant to extracting and transporting oil and gas from the Caspian Sea region.

1 Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 28, 1999 2 The Employers Association of Bulgaria in cooperation with the Centre for Liberal Strategies: ‘Economic Benefits For Bulgaria From Joining NATO’, 05.10.2001 www.cls-sofia.org/publications/papers/nato_econ_benefits_en.pdf
3 Federation of American Scientists Arms Sales Monitoring Project www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/sales_db.htm
4 ‘Pentagon Welfare: The Corporate Campaign for NATO Expansion’, William D. Hartung, Multinational Monitor, March, 1998
5 www.nato.int/pfp/eapc-cnt.htm 6 www.nato.int/pfp/sig-cntr.htm 7 www.mfa.gov.yu/ForeignInvest/Inogate_e.htm#one